MSI is preparing to release a new Mini ITX motherboard that comes with a pre-installed Intel bay Trail-D processor. The new motherboard is the MSI J1800I and will be available for around $100 USD.

The Mini ITX form factor board features two DDR3 1333MHz SO-DIMM slots, two SATA III 6Gbps ports, and a single PCI-E x1 expansion slot. The aspect that sets this mini ITX board apart is the inclusion of a dual core Intel Celeron J1800 processor clocked at 2.4GHz. This CPU is a Bay Trail-D based on the Silvermont (Atom) micro-architecture. The chip has a 10W TDP and is passively cooled by a bundled aluminum heatsink.

IO options on the MSI J1800I motherboard include:

2 x PS/2

1 x VGA

1 x HDMI

1 x DVI

1 x USB 3.0

2 x USB 2.0

1 x GbE

3 x Audio

The board could make for a small home server or media box in the living room. The Bay Trail-D processor carries Intel's "Celeron" branding, but is is effectively an OoOE Atom chip. The motherboard+CPU combo should retail for just under $100 and be available soon. More information can be found on this MSI product page.

Everywhere else I have seen this story it is $60 not $100 and also that there is going to be a quad core version for $10 more which would be more than enough to do any decent 1080p playback as a media center pc.